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reasons I enjoyed working there. (The other reason is that there is a movie theater in the same complex, and sometimes they let me mooch a bag of free popcorn.) When I started, there were two other female lawyers, and three female paralegals. The lawyer who recruited me cashed out and took early retirement right after her youngest kid got out of college. The other female lawyer got a job in Philly and I haven’t seen her since. The two remaining partners laid off all the paralegals as a cost-cutting move last year. I am the only woman left in the office, except for the receptionist we share with a firm in another suite on the same floor. This is a roundabout way to explain that I have the women’s bathroom all to myself now. It’s one of the few perks.
    I mention this to say that when I got the e-mail from my mother, I was in the bathroom, looking at my personal e-mail on my phone. (I have a rule about looking at personal e-mail or social media on my work computer, which I break about as often as anyone else.) All Mother sent me was a link to the obituary, from the website for the local Cape May paper.
    I read the first paragraph, just to get the dead man’s name and to figure out where the funeral actually was, and I skipped the rest of it. Nobody believes me when I say this, but it’s the truth and I think it’s a perfectly plausible thing that happened, and if I were a man and said I was in the bathroom when I read it, nobody would think twice because that’s something people believe that men do all the time. This is what I read, all that I read:
     
BERKMAN, SHELDON, 67, of Cape May, passed away on Monday, March 12. He was a native of Cherry Hill, the son of the late Aaron Berkman and Hannah Berkman. He retired to Cape May four years ago. He served for twenty years in the United States Air Force, retiring as a technical sergeant. He served at Elmendorf, Dyess, and McGuire Air Force Bases. After retirement from active duty, he worked as a machinist in the engineering division of PF Avionics in Lakehurst. Funeral services will be held at First Presbyterian Church, Cape May, on Friday morning, March 17, at 10:00 a.m. He is survived by a sister, Bernice, and a nephew.
     
    I stopped reading there, which was a mistake, but I didn’t know it at the time. I couldn’t imagine the loosest possible connection between my liberal-activist mother and a career military man. My best guess was that Pacey had been right and they had known each other at Cherry Hill High School.
    What I thought I did with the obituary was to forward the link to my work e-mail, so I could forward it to our managing partner with a note telling him I was taking off on Friday. What I actually did was hit the wrong icon and posted the link to the obituary to Facebook, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I switched over to Pinterest to check out a pair of dark orange heels. A few minutes after that, I got up and went back to work and forgot all about Mother and Sheldon Berkman and the funeral.
     
    It took me until about eight o’clock that night to finally clean out my in-box. I responded to everything except for a couple of e-mails from the cute LinkedIn guy from the day before. My guess was he was looking to share some hot investment tips, but that could wait until I got back from Cape May.
    All I had left to do for tomorrow was one memo for one of the partners, and it wouldn’t take me long to finish. That meant I could sneak out early on Thursday afternoon and take Friday off without causing anyone unnecessary agita. Dinner was a plate of takeout Thai red curry left over from Monday night, which I washed down with one of my less successful attempts at mixology. It was a horrible concoction of lemon vodka, Sprite, and melon liqueur that looked like antifreeze and probably wasn’t any better for me than drinking actual antifreeze.
    The only problem I would have would be if one of my clients died in the next day or so. I try not to think about